Coral reefs, as vital to tropical fish as trees are to birds, are becoming more vulnerable to a process called "bleaching," which occurs when a spike in water temperatures causes coral to expel the algae that provide their kaleidoscope colours, leaving them prone to starvation or disease. Today, swaths of the once-psychedelic Great Barrier Reef in Australia have turned boneyard white and largely devoid of life.
Scientists fear a similar fate could await the Coral Triangle, a huge underwater wonderland east of Borneo endowed with a trove of biodiversity comparable to the rainforests of the Amazon Basin. Millions of people depend on its bounty to survive, a large share of them Malaysians, who eat an average of 57kg of fish each a year - more than double the world average.
The appetite for farmed species is so voracious, almost 20 percent of the annual catch from the world's seas is ground into fishmeal, a nutrient-rich powder that forms the basis of the feeds used from salmon cages in Scottish lochs to shrimp ponds on Borneo. Vast amounts of fish have been taken from poorer countries to feed species destined for the plates of wealthier consumers. In addition, shrimp farms, in particular, have made coastal communities in the tropics even more vulnerable by cutting down mangroves, their first line of defence against extreme weather and rising sea levels.
Since the mid-1970s, the aquaculture industry has led to the destruction of more than 1.3 million acres of mangroves spread across Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, China, Brazil and Ecuador, according to a 2013 paper in the Bulletin of Marine Science. Untreated waste and epidemics of shrimp-killing diseases mean the gains can be short-lived: A study published this year identified more than half a million acres of abandoned shrimp ponds in Indonesia alone.
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